have the effect of goading him on from crime to crime. He still mistakes his inward pangs for outward perils. Guilt peoples his whereabout with fantastical terrors, which he labours to beat down, and thereby only multiplies. In his efforts to dissimulate he loses his self-control, and spills, or thinks he spills, the secret he is trying to hide; and in giving others cause to suspect him he plants his own heart full of suspicions against them. Thus his cowardice of conscience urges him on to fresh murders, and every murder adds to that cowardice; the very blood which he spills to quiet his fears sprouting up in "gorgons and chimeras dire," to awaken new fears and call for more victims.

rors.

I suppose it is a natural result of an imagination so redundant and excitable as his, that the agonies of remorse should project and embody themselves in imaginary terrors, and so spur him on to further crimes for security against those terTo give himself peace, Macbeth must still keep using his dagger; and yet every thrust he makes with it just stabs a new wound in his own soul. Such is the dreadful madness which guilt engenders in him! His moral forces indeed turn to a downright fury and venom of infatuation, insomuch that he boldly enters the lists against the very powers in which he has trusted.

All this comes out in his interview with Lady Macbeth on the eve of Banquo's murder:

:

We have but scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it:

She'll close, and be herself; whilst our poor malice
Remains in danger of her former tooth. But let
The frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer,
Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep

In the affliction of these terrible dreams

That shake us nightly: better be with the dead,

Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace,

Than on the torture of the mind to lie

In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;

After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well;

Treason has done his worst: not steel, nor poison,

Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing

Can touch him further.

Here we see that crime has filled his mind with scorpions, and still he thinks of no way to clear them out but by crime. And the thought of Duncan instantly charms him into a feverish brooding over the dangers which he seems to have invited against himself by murdering him. And it is well worth noting how, in this speech, as in several others, he goes on kindling more and more with his theme, till he fairly loses himself in a trance of moral and imaginative thought. The inward burnings of guilt act as a sort of inspiration to him. For the preternatural illumination of mind, which so often transports him, marks the insurgent stress of those moral forces which I have already noted in him.

Critics of a certain school have, in characteristic fashion, found fault with the huddling together and confusion of metaphors which Macbeth pours forth in his most excited moHere is an instance of what I mean:

ments.

Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep!·
the innocent sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great Nature's second course,

Chief nourisher in life's feast.

In this, and other like strains, the aforesaid critics take it rather ill, that Macbeth does not talk more according to the rules of grammar and Blair. Shakespeare was content to let him talk according to his state of mind and the laws of

his character. Nor, in this view, could any thing better serve than such a preternatural rush and redundancy of imagination, hurrying him on from thought to thought, and running and massing a multitude of half-formed images together. And such a cast of mind in the hero was perhaps necessary to the health of the drama: otherwise such a manifold tragedy had been in danger of turning out a mere accumulation of horrors. As it is, the impression is at once softened and deepened, after a style of art which Shakespeare alone could evoke and manage; the terrible treading, sometimes trembling, on the outermost edge, yet never passing over into the horrible. Thus a much higher degree of tragic effect is attained than would else stand within the terms of pleasurable emotion. Macbeth's imagination so overwrought and self-accelerating, this it is that glorifies the drama with such an interfusion of tragic rapture and lyrical sweetness, and pours over the whole that baptism of terrible beauty which forms its distinctive excellence. If you would move men deeply, you must stimulate their active powers in proportion as you tax their receptive. And when a man's imaginative forces are duly kindled, he will bear, and even enjoy, a stress of appeal, which would else defeat itself by stunning or revolting his sensibilities. Which is one reason, no doubt, why so many rather ambitious attempts at tragedy have proved in effect but "lamentable comedies."

Before passing on from the hero, I will advert briefly to one or two minute, but, I think, highly significant notes of character. Thus, at the first meeting of Macbeth and his wife :

Mach. My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night.

Lady M. And when goes hence?

Macb. To-morrow, -as he purposes.

Again in the morning after the murder, when several Thanes make an early call upon him :

In the former case he meditates defeating the King's purpose by killing him; in the latter he has made it impossible for the King's appointment to be kept. And in both his mind is struck with a sudden impulse to be true to itself. He is wickedly ambitious, but not meanly false: honour, and the truthfulness that belongs to it, is something of a passion with him; and in these cases the instant conscience of falsehood pricks him into a mending of his speech. He finds it not easy at first to keep his tongue and heart from beating time together it is hardly in his nature indeed to "look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it "; and there-> fore it is that his wife so pointedly warns him, "Your face, my thane, is as a book, where men may read strange matters." There is indeed much truth in her soliloquized description of him :

Thou wouldst be great;

Art not without ambition, but without

The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,

And yet wouldst wrongly win.

Character of Lady Macbeth.

In the structure and working of her mind and moral frame, Lady Macbeth is the opposite of her husband, and therefore all the fitter to countervail his infirmity of purpose; that is, she differs from him in just the right way to supplement him. Of a firm, sharp, wiry, matter-of-fact intellect, doubly charged with energy of will, she has little in common

:

with him save a red-hot ambition: hence, while the Weird disclosures act on her will just as on his, and she jumps forthwith into the same purpose, the effect on her mind is wholly different. Without his irritability of understanding and imagination, she is therefore subject to no such involuntary transports of thought. Accordingly she never loses herself in any raptures of meditation; no illusions born of guilty fear get the mastery of her; at least, not when her will is in exercise in her waking moments, her senses are always so thoroughly in her keeping, that she hears and sees things just as they are. As conscience draws no visions before her eyes, and shapes no voices in her hearing; so, while he is shaken and quite unmanned with fantastical terrors, she remains externally calm, collected, and cool. Her presence of mind indeed seems firmest when his trances of illusion run highest; so that, instead of being at all infected with his agitations, her forces then move in the aptest order to recover him from them. Which shows that her sympathy with his ambition, intense as it is, has no power to make her sympathize with his mental workings. It may almost be said indeed, that what stimulates his imagination stifles hers.

Almost any other dramatist would have brought the Weird Sisters to act immediately on Lady Macbeth, and on her husband through her, as thinking her more open to superstitious allurements and charms. Shakespeare seems to have judged that aptness of mind for them to work upon would have disqualified her for working upon her husband in aid of them. Enough of such influence has already been brought to bear what is needed further, is quite another sort of influence, such as could only come from a mind not much accessible to the Weird Sisters.

There was strong dramatic reason, therefore, why Lady